“So not even the Godfang can operate without a crew?”
“I wouldn’t say she couldn’t,” the Flesh Eater stressed, “but she doesn’t. It’s an agreement of sorts, I suppose, a sacred vow. The Destarion is a traditionalist at heart.”
“At heart,” Sergio said unconsciously, but this time it seemed the Flesh Eater opted not to hear him.
“Captain Edwyn Dale is failing,” she told him. “I am here to find a new Captain. Without a Captain, without renewed mission parameters, the Destarion will remain on stowage-standby indefinitely. And I, of course, will not gain full functionality.”
“And the Fergunak?”
“The … ?”
“The sharks with the cybernetic–”
“Yes yes, I know what you mean, I just didn’t understand the shift in subject.”
“I see.”
“I picked up a certain amount of data about them during our military engagement,” the Flesh Eater said a little snappily.
“Of course.”
“And there are more elegant ways to exchange data, even beyond the high-density transmission we currently enjoy,” she added. “Now that you’re integrated, this … dialogue … is frustratingly monochromatic.”
“It’s what I’m used to.”
“Yes,” the ship fell into a moody silence – Sergio admitted it was only a guess that she was being moody, but he felt as though it was an educated guess – before saying, “the Fergunak fell victim to the weaponised data streams I implemented on Bluothesh’s initial commands, as I said. The streams are – or were – relatively harmless, intended for communications disruption. They may have been more effective than intended. I am … rusty.”
“Rusty?”
“Not literally, of course,” the Flesh Eater laughed. “My hull material does not oxidise, even if there was oxygen to permit such a thing.”
“I sort of assumed.”
“I am out of sync with the galaxy, with your levels of technology, with the characteristics of your allies.”
“And the Fergunak weren’t ready for this comms disruption thing you pulled on them?”
“The Fergunak proved rather more vulnerable than anticipated,” the Flesh Eater said, “with a higher degree of cybernetic integration and dependence.”
“So. Po Chane got into your comms dampener and enslaved an entire school of Fergunak,” Sergio summarised. “Two schools, since it seems as though our crewmembers have also been hit.”
“With an exposure of greatly reduced duration,” the ship once again sounded huffy, “and it’s probably for the best that they were. If they hadn’t been, we might have run into serious trouble when your vessel attempted to ram us at ten thousand times the speed of light just now.”
“And the same thing that corrupted the Fergunak also took out relative drive capacity in the small ships?” Sergio probed.
“Actually, that was the Rotten Ivan,” the Flesh Eater said, “as I believe you had already figured out. Bluothesh said he had a way of trapping ships that are traversing this region at relative speed, and I agreed to it because it seemed like the easiest way of acquiring human contacts without taking untested new components – or my rusty old ones – into a more heavily-populated area. I pictured something along the lines of field suppressors like the Destarion has, but this was far more primitive. Still, better than anything I had at my disposal.”
“They used the Fergunakil network,” Sergio said.
“Yes. They cobbled it together. Crude, as I said, but quite ingenious. And when we pulled the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan out into normal space, the mercenaries on board hit Bluothesh’s suppressor network with some sort of counterattack. It was all very haphazard, but it succeeded in knocking out the relative drives of all of our smaller craft. They knocked out their own drives as well, but that was apparently a price they were willing to pay to trap us here.”
“It’s standard practice for convoy defence vessels,” Sergio said idly, “on lucrative trade routes that occasionally get hit by Fergunak schools–”
“You don’t need to tell me about convoy defence practices,” the Flesh Eater said in tones of mild amusement.
“I’m just saying, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to a corsair band actually accustomed to hunting trade routes,” Sergio replied. “Bluothesh and his clan were Hades line lurkers, and you … well, let’s say you’re not up to date on contemporary piracy and counterpiracy tactics.”
“Fair to say,” the Flesh Eater conceded.
“It’s not legal, strictly speaking, but it works,” Sergio went on. “Usually. At least until the big brains of the Six Species come up with some shift in suppressor field tech that makes the counter-suppression impossible.”
“Certainly I would not have believed such a vulnerability existed,” the ship said, “if I had not seen the relative drives you use. I imagine it is an issue even for the authorities, attempting to shut down lawbreakers equipped with the technology.”
“In some of the wilder parts of Six Species space,” Sergio agreed dryly. “You may be surprised to hear that the AstroCorps uniform is not universally respected.”
“Very droll.”
“Some of the big Blaran and Separatist groups use the counter-suppressor offensively,” Sergio said, “especially in those cases where they’re in ships big enough to shrug off the effects and carry on their way, leaving their enemies stranded … but most of them are illegally-mounted last-ditch defences on ships like the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan. And since it’s not legal for Fergunak to attack traders either, traders tend to take the view that it’s better to be alive to apologise to the authorities for using restricted technology.”
“Assuming they survive such a risky tactic.”
“Yes. On encountering a suppressor of the sort the Children of the Bluothesh used, it’s only natural that they’d hit back with a counter-suppression pulse, trapping the smaller ships so they can’t go looking for more sharks … it’s dirty, and only works if you’re willing to do some damage to your own engines and maybe get yourself stuck in a deserted volume with a bunch of angry sharks, but in this case…”
“Can the engine damage to the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan be repaired?”
“Well, look at it this way,” Sergio said. “A secondary purpose of the defence is to leave the enemy with ships they can’t fly or easily convoy out of the ambush volume. The damage can be corrected, but it’s usually caused by a frequency-shift in the torus feeds that only the defending crew will know.”
“Ah,” the Flesh Eater said, “allowing them to use it as a bargaining chip in exchange for their lives.”
“It doesn’t usually work,” Sergio admitted, “which makes the whole thing more of a scorched-earth fuck-you to the would-be pirates than any serious attempt at self-preservation. Have fun with these ships you can’t take anywhere. I suppose when these poor saps got a look at you, and realised they’d been pulled out of soft-space by a great grey full of Fergunak, they figured it was scorched-earth time,” he not-gestured again. “They probably weren’t anticipating your secondary weapons, but the Po Chane may ultimately have been more merciful than death by shark.”
“I was left with little recourse and limited control,” the Flesh Eater said stiffly. “Technically I suppose the great grey leviathan’s drive would have remained functional despite the pulse – as you have noticed, the same pulse also propagated through your cybernetic network and beached your smaller craft, but your ship was unaffected – but … unfortunately, the Fergunak on board the leviathan had already managed to disable their own ship’s relative drive – after we had set up the trap here.”
“They said that something had been taken from him…” Sergio mused.
“Excuse me?”
“Aha,” Sergio said with grim humour, “so you did hear that. I was actually just thinking out loud. Apparently ‘out loud’ is the only real concrete thinking I can do at this stage.”
“I am
sorry,” the Flesh Eater still sounded stiff and wounded. “It will of course take some adjustment, on both sides–”
“It doesn’t matter. I was thinking about the Fergunakil we met, the one that lured us here. He’d gotten free of the school and went to find help. I assume you allowed that to happen, just as you allowed the relative drives to be broken. You could correct the issue if necessary, but you wanted to make sure you all stayed put until you’d gotten things set up. Bring the necessary components to you in a controllable way. I suppose the same mentality behind the relative-field counter-suppression–”
“Things have been confused and suboptimal,” the Flesh Eater said. “I wouldn’t give me too much credit for planning and strategy.”
“Confused and suboptimal,” Sergio repeated in amusement. “But you did want him to get to a handy shoal-line and call for help,” he insisted. “All part of your suboptimal plan to get humans here, without barging into our delicate and unprepared settlements?”
“Playing it safe,” the Flesh Eater said. “Same as my extension around the leviathan and the Blaran ship, and expansion to full size. It was not only the greatest hull-surface over which the great grey leviathan’s relative field could be extended, and in a simple mathematical configuration that was easy to program, but it was close to my own full extension. Maximum intimidation, if at a certain cost.”
“Paper-thin,” Sergio thought-said.
“Quite.”
“But not as vulnerable as we would have expected a paper-thin hull to be.”
“No.”
“Like a wounded animal,” Sergio said in amusement, “puffing itself up to scare away predators and scavengers.”
“There’s a reason that trait evolves,” the Flesh Eater said primly, “and why we imitate it. It works.”
“It kept us from threatening you,” Sergio conceded.
“It did little to improve Bluothesh’s mood,” the ship said. “Especially after the hull’s extant vulnerabilities were revealed by his Second. At that point, he became very upset.”
“I noticed that.”
“It was still mostly the self-sabotage of the Fergunak that upset him,” the Flesh Eater said. “Perhaps, as you say, he was not prepared to wage trade route piracy using the tools at his disposal.”
“Perhaps,” Sergio allowed. “I hardly think a direct strike at a larger settlement would have gone better for you, though.”
“Certainly not,” the Flesh Eater agreed. “Besides, I think the battle with the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan only exacerbated his existing anger – over the hostilities that had led to the ruin of his clan in the first place.”
“His son should probably have known better than to violate Fergunakil territory,” Sergio noted. “As for the rest … I think, when the Blaren came back out of the bonefields with you, and your comms-disruption signal took whatever it did from them, they did what they could against an enemy they knew nothing about,” he would have shivered if he could, still remembering the lone Fergunakil they’d encountered, and the way Drakamod’s school had reacted to it.
“Bluothesh was very upset.”
“Again, I was left in no doubt about that,” Sergio said, far more politely than he felt Po Chane’s quite literal murder of him warranted. “But what you have to realise is, no matter what you’ve done to these Blaren, Bluothesh and his clan are still Blaren. And an upset Blaran is nothing next to an upset Fergunakil.”
“I’m not sure what that means.”
“It means none of us are getting out of here alive,” Sergio thought, and this time he didn’t care if it came out as words.
XXI
Her effectiveness was severely hampered by the disconnection of the Fergunak, but at least the Draka’s tactical integrity seemed to be intact. The great grey leviathan, in the meanwhile, was floundering amidst the craggy icebergs she’d shed in the aftermath of their brief engagement, and the wreckage of the old Blaran ship that had been sharing the Flesh Eater’s interior. The ice was invisible in the darkness, blinding blue-white in the prism-arc floods.
The great grey had stopped trying to fire on them, and now seemed to be attempting to claw her way out of the debris field. She was a habitat above all, not designed for war – except insofar as all Fergunakil vessels were designed for war just in case they ended up starting one.
War, Attacus thought. If this is a war, it has to be the strangest one on the books. Not that it would ever end up on the books – not in its true form, anyway, and with all facts intact.
Great greys generally depended on their large Fergunakil population, and their formidable attendant flotillas of gunships and clippers, to defend them. In her current state of depopulation, and with her severely-depleted smaller vessels suffering gridnet damage and confusion as well as being up against a superior warship, the great grey was on the ragged brink of death.
This was, of course, when Fergunak were most dangerous.
“Any sign of the Flesh Eater?” he asked.
“Nothing yet, Captain,” Drakamod, who he thought was still on board but might now be piloting one of the gunships, reported. Her voice, audio only and routed through an old secure hard-wave whisper pulse, was tinny and robotic. The Mundus protocol had left the Fergunak without full comms access. You couldn’t sneak a destructive undercourse into a whisper message.
It was, of course, too late – if Drakamod’s school had been affected and were hiding it, a split-second would have been all they needed to infect the ship. Attacus had given them minutes. There was nothing much to be done about it now, of course.
The Blaran ship, meanwhile, seemed to have vented all the air and debris she was going to, and was now essentially dead in space, a derelict. She wasn’t entirely without signs of life, however.
“Are they shuttles?” Attacus frowned.
“Shuttles, landers, escape pods,” Fetorax W’Fale confirmed from the comms station. “It looks like the Po Chane – the ones who are still unaugmented Blaren – are jumping ship.”
“They’re heading for the civilian ships,” Baadan reported.
“Aren’t they dead too?” Attacus asked.
“Not as dead as theirs,” W’Fale replied. “It looks as though the Flesh Eater was the only thing holding that one together and keeping her life support going.”
“Have you repeated our offer of fair treatment if they surrender themselves to our custody?” Attacus asked. “Maybe they didn’t get that message passed on to them last time.”
“I’m transmitting on all available secure bands,” W’Fale said. “They’re…” she paused. “They’re still headed directly for the Linda and the Ivan.”
“They’re flying right through the Fergies,” Baadan said tensely.
There was a tense, yet almost philosophical silence on the bridge of the Draka as they watched the Blaren – the real Blaren – of the Po Chane fleeing the remains of their old ship, picking their way through the ice in a motley assortment of small vessels, making a determined beeline for the Linda Gazmouth and the Rotten Ivan.
The tattered remains of the Children of the Bluothesh school swirled and circled slowly through the wreckage and miniature comets, but seemed more interested for the moment in latching onto some of the liquid-retaining pieces of ice and dragging them away in the direction of the great grey. There were still a few dozen Fergunak drifting free, and their fellows appeared heart-warmingly set on rescuing them.
Other gunships, however, were casually picking apart the frozen chunks and tearing apart the Fergunak within them for components or food, and others still were beginning to circle the Blaran escape flotilla. Attacus leaned forward in his seat, wondering if he’d done the right thing cutting his own Fergunak loose. It wouldn’t really have helped to keep them connected to the Draka’s systems, of course – even under optimal circumstances, a well-disciplined and landbound-friendly school of Fergunak would have a hard time ignoring a bunch of floating landers and escape pods.
“Keep us c
lose to the great grey,” Attacus ordered, “but target the first few gunships to get too close to those Blaren.”“
“Their gunships or ours?” Baadan asked.
“Either,” Attacus replied, as she must have known he would. He pointed. “The great grey is still trying to put enough distance between herself and the ice – and us – to make a safe jump,” he said. “Get us in tighter.”
“Any tighter and she’ll be able to vent…” Baadan said, then paused. “Captain.”
Attacus had seen it. Some of their Fergunak had latched onto one of the larger chunks of extruded ice, and were now sending it ponderously towards the great grey leviathan – specifically, her transpersion vents. As they watched, the hab-ship opened up and torched the corpse-scattered iceberg, illuminating it brilliantly and blasting a tail of instantly-crystallising vapour out behind it. It was, between the Draka’s harsh lights and the shooey-fire of the vents, astonishingly beautiful.
Then the remains of the ice collided with the great grey, the vent was smashed open and the transperse overflow blasted out into space in a wide and largely-harmless cone of rapidly-diminishing light. The Children of the Bluothesh still mobile in their smaller vessels immediately began to gather together, and the Draka’s Fergunak did the same. The Po Chane evacuees, meanwhile, were forgotten for the moment.
“Thank you, Drakamod,” Attacus murmured.
As if on cue, another of the angular little giela devices on the bridge wall activated, dropped to the floor and clicked across to the Captain’s console.
“I thought the giela were locked out,” Tate said.
“Secure thread,” Attacus explained in as vague a manner as he could, watching the gleaming articulated figure cautiously.
“Captain Athel,” it said, and Attacus could tell – despite the shift from Acting Captain to Captain – that it was not a Fergunakil on the other end. “A word?”
Deadshepherd (Tales of the Final Fall of Man Anthology Book 1) Page 30